Peach Fuzz

Peach fuzz across the skin, like the fur of a small animal. 

He hands it to me, the one plucked from the very top of the pyramid stacked in the wicker bin. I saw him lean on one foot to snatch it. Knocking another free. I watched my father choose this one, distinct from its brothers and sisters that waited in the pile below, already bruising under the weight of each other. 

You look like twins, says the man at the register, grinning down at me. 

She’s my only brown-haired girl, my father says. I feel it like gold inside my veins. 

My fingers leave small dents like valleys across the furry skin. It is soft against my lips. I can taste the sweet and salt of the rain that fell in the spring, and the sun that pressed against the trunks of the trees and the bristling leaves and the fruit that swung like bells from the tips of the red-brown boughs. 

I feel his eyes on me. His face is the sky, and I cannot look at it. 

Take a bite, he says. But I can’t sink my teeth into it. The life inside, spongy flesh and pulsing veins and seeds waiting to grow into another tree some day. 

It will bleed, I say, so quietly that only the peach can hear me. 

He pulls it from my fingers, and I watch the red and yellow flash against his teeth. His chin drips. He closes his eyes.

Perfect, he says, pressing it into my hand. The skin is ragged at the edges. Inside, a pit like a dark eye. It is wet and hot against my lips, and I can feel the soft ruffle of the hairs. 

He smiles at me, Go ahead, and I feel the warmth of the sun and the soft sweet rains melt across my skin. His face is the sky. I am used to the storms, the curtain of heavy clouds. I can feel when his winds begin to rise, and I curl my body away into itself, and I hope for a sunny day to come along soon. 

Today, there is sun. The peach is sticky sweet, and I swallow twice to push it down my throat. He is smiling down on me. I smile back. My eyes water, and I wonder if he thinks that I am sad, that I am crying. Then I feel my eyes begin to burn, and I am crying. And he turns away to give the man a dollar, and I feel his hand on my shoulder and I pray that he will never take it off again, and I feel his fingers slide away.

I would do anything for him.

———

Peach fuzz along his jaw, patchy like the scattered onion grass in my backyard. It left red marks on my cheek and upper lip. We stood in the stone arch between the dormitory doors, and he asked to see my room. He tasted like listerine and cigarettes, and I felt my tongue stumble backwards into my mouth, and I didn’t let myself pull away. 

You know, I noticed you the first week, he said. He had freckles on his nose and black hair that glinted when he turned his head to look across the empty lawn. 

Me? I felt his hand like a hot iron pressing against my waist. 

His head moved closer. What floor do you live on?

Don’t you have a girlfriend?

We broke up, he said. His fingers tightened on my arm. He opened the door. The hall was lined with cold white lights.

Standing in a basement now, smelling Svedka and mango Fanta and sweat, I can feel him like a sunburst through the crowd. Bodies pass between us. I stare across the room with the corners of my eyes, wondering if he is looking at me. When the bodies part, I see him with his arm wrapped easily around the waist of the junior who led my orientation group. He is surrounded by more people I don’t know, and they are all yelling and laughing. From the corners of my eyes, I watch his fingers curl against her hip. I watch his eyes flicker everywhere else.

Where are you going? says the girl beside me, who I have known for six days. I feel my feet moving, and the bodies tumbling past me like water, and the thrum of the music in my throat. 

He sees me first. I watch his mouth flinch, and then the others all turn together and their circle parts for me. In the middle, his finger is latched through the waist of her jeans. Her eyes cut into me like glass.

Hi, I say to him, and he looks around as if I meant to address one of them instead. 

Oh! she says, still wrapped in his arm. Weren’t you one of my freshmen? I look at him, but he is staring over my shoulder into the crowd. I nod at her. Her eyes are brown and narrow-cornered like a fox. Are you having fun?

I thought you broke up, I say into the swell of the music. 

What? She leans toward me. Something red spills from her cup onto my shoe. Oh shit, sorry, she says. It’s too crowded for either of us to bend down, and we have nothing to blot it up. 

I’m okay, I yell back into her ear. He is not looking at me.

Well, I guess I’ll see you around, she yells back. The circle closes around her, and I am alone. 

Limbs press into me, elbows and shoulders, hot and writhing. I let them push me through the crowd, toward the slanted staircase that glows with purple light from above. I can feel the rush of air against my face. Across the floor, figures swirling like the currents of a river, and in the corner a circle of faces still laughing. 

I feel his eyes flutter over the crowd. They land on me, softly, like the press of a finger.

I see a carpeted hallway with rows of labeled doors, and two bodies in the cool darkness, and the orange streetlight through the blinds, and the feeling like a bright flame that I have been chosen. I feel the soft press of his eyes, and then they flutter away. The music slams against my throat. 

I would do anything for him.

———

Peach fuzz on my cheek, tickling the tip of my chin. He turns his head, and I listen to his wet sigh and the press of his lips. His head is heavy, his arms like tiny logs thrown across my ribs. Once his whole body fit on my chest, and he would mew like a kitten if he couldn’t feel the pulse and squeeze of my heart. He will not sleep like this much longer. I only tricked him into it just now, pulling him half asleep from the crib to sprawl across my stomach. 

He wants to sleep alone, to sit alone, to stand on his own legs. He reaches for things he can hardly hold onto. Only six months, and already I can feel his feet spinning away from me, desperate for the world. 

When he smiles, I feel myself glow. I sing to him, songs that make him smile again, that make him watch me with his eyes wide and his mouth pink and open and grinning.

Do you like me? I hear myself think sometimes, when my singing falls flat. Do you like how I look? Will I be what you hope for? 

I take him to the house where my mother lives. We sit on two chairs in the yard, and I slide mine under the shade of the umbrella. 

I don’t remember August being this hot, I say. I press a finger into the folds of his neck and pull the socks off of his feet. 

We talked yesterday, says my mother. Her head is leaning back against the chair. I can feel her watching me through her sunglasses. He asked me again about meeting his grandson.

I thought he was only allowed to email you about the divorce, I say. 

I want to be amicable, she says, her voice like a window snapping shut. I told him it’s your decision, anyway. 

I feel my hands squeeze tighter. He lied to me about still seeing her, I say. 

I know, says my mother.

She’s two years older than I am.

She blows out a long sigh like a gust of wind. I know, she says. 

The world beyond the umbrella is too bright. I can feel the sun pressing in on us, snapping up the once-green grass and brittling the edges of the trees. She turns toward me, and I see the two of us reflected in the black shine of her glasses. She rubs his cheek with the tip of her finger. He grabs it and pulls it toward his mouth. 

I actually can see some of you in him, she says, smiling at me. We consider his bowed legs and tiny clefted chin, neither of them mine.  In my lap, he begins to squirm, scratching at my bare legs with the tips of his fingers. 

I want you to be like me, I think. I want you to be nothing like me. 

And you know, says my mother, first-borns are always clones of their fathers. It kept the cavemen fathers from abandoning the cave.

I rub my hand across his tawny brown hair. It is wild and thick, curling out from a tiny swirl on the back left of his head. I trace the swirl with my finger. I can find it easily, even with my eyes closed. I have found it dozens of times on my husband. 

Alone in the dark with the house at rest and my husband breathing beside me, I feel the thoughts press in. If I am lucky, I think, he will grow to be like the man beside me. He will be generous and clever and ambitious. He will color the world around him. He will not be selfish and stubborn and afraid. He will not lie in bed thinking that maybe if he had asked better questions, not laughed so loudly, tried to love science fiction and Formula One racing, not pushed or questioned or demanded, maybe he would have been something worth holding onto. 

The sunlight is pressing closer to us, sliding underneath the umbrella’s shadow. I pull him to my chest, and he is still. His peach fuzz hair brushes my chin. He smells like sunbaked grass and sweet fruit.

I will be the sky, spread open like a pair of arms.

I will do anything for him.